Laura Callaghan's Fantastic Illustrations Challenge Vapid Motivational Images And Text

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Scroll for a few minutes and you’ll be assaulted by dozens of ‘motivational’ and ‘inspirational’ ideas, unknown people telling you how to live your life in minimalist designs and elaborate fonts. Girls especially are being bombarded by these pseudo-aspirational ideas at an alarming rate, which results in a rose-tinted vision of a far harsher world. Irish-born illustrator extraordinaire, Laura Callaghan, has noticed this trend and based her series ‘Aspirational’ on pointing out the flaws in this very system.

Before ‘Aspirational,’ she had already done a few pieces on the ludicrous representation of idealism in the media, but when she really started to look into it she found that the concept of big brand-name companies employing these methods to try and engage their consumers on a personal level had become an epidemic. Among the barrage of seemingly profound statements there were almost none that had any real world applications and it reached the point where women were being held to impossibly high standards of living by Pinterest boards.

Laura felt that in an age where people can edit out the undesirable aspects of their life on social media and portray a pristine image to the world, it was necessary to create art that was more authentic and truthful about the challenges of reality. All her art shows the wide spectrum of life, ‘My work is very much rooted in reality and the everyday, so I don’t think it makes much sense not to draw diverse characters. It’s important that my illustrations are relatable and accessible, I’m trying to create narratives within my work and those stories don’t just belong to one girl’ she magazine, in an exclusive interview.

Messages telling girls they can be and do anything are splayed across images of women airbrushed to within an inch of their lives. They’re told to be brave and take risks but most are surviving on intern salaries and drowning in college debts. The women of Laura’s paintings are the embodiment of these contradictions; complex and beautiful but struggling with insecurities and self-doubt.

While her work is meant to be empowering, Laura also believes that the body positivity movement has become lost in the maze of social media. She believes that “A broad and all-encompassing issue has somehow become primarily about how we should all love our curves… as long as those curves are in the right place and still fit into a size 16 dress.”
She works in watercolour, printed textiles and screen prints all in bold pop colours which emanate the wild personalities of their subjects. She captures the duality of daily life, women in ordinary situations being quietly extraordinary. She is resolved to “embrace the trashy, weird and ugly aspects” of her art which manages to be simultaneously bright and bleak.

‘Aspirational’ is a true representation of the powerful effect of the social media phenomenon and how it’s slowly devaluing reality. Callaghan didn’t have a specific intent with this series. She simply wanted to highlight the issue without inadvertently becoming a part of it by forcing it down the throats of her viewers. Her message is open to interpretation but she does aim to get people thinking and questioning the standards of the beauty industry. It’s her hope that people start noticing the vapid promises of social sites and find a way to live happily on their own terms.

Scroll on to see some of her work from this series.